Changing gears...

You may ask, what's with the title of this blog...

         Well I have come to a decision to put the creation of my first ever book, "Doubling Your Summer" on hold. Although I have invested much time and effort into creating my vision for this book, I have decided that I do not currently have the knowledge to meet the standards that the title of my book seems to offer.

          The first week that I started writing this book, my intent was to write a book that would be created for young adults and teenagers where they could have a step by step process of how to "double your summer money." I came to understand that it is not that simple, and frankly, is not completely realistic. Since most of the advice ran around the purchasing of stocks, or business models, with an ever changing market, the advice could be completely false by the time the book was published.

          So after long thoughts and a few months later, I started to blog about my book... and it was going to be a book about generally understanding the stock market, tips and ideas of how to do well financially at a young age, and tips on planning for one's future retirement. It would even include advice that I have received from adults, along with things that I have learned over time which I believe are important to pass on... things that have brought me success and happiness.

          I finally began blogging about things that had nothing to do with the title, "Doubling Your Summer Money." In fact, for quite a while, up untill recently, I had forgotten what my blog was trully made to be. I often question whether most of the traffic that has come to my blog came because of what my title promised? At that point, I started to realize what I  truly wanted to write about.

          So for the past month, I have been working on a new book. I am sorta combining a lot of the new ideas I had for "Doubling Your Summer Money" and bringing them together with my new idea. I have come up with a bucket full of ideas for the title of my book, but I'm not sure which one works well. Here they are: "The Generation with No Curtains" "Oops, I forgot to close my blinds" "The virtual Children of the Twenty First Century" "The Generation of LOL's"

          So the whole idea of my book is about how we as a generation and most of society as a whole has no more privacy in life. You can basically find out anything about anyone on the internet. We are a very trusting generation and society... So trusting that we put pictures of ourselves, addresses, phone numbers and emails on facebook... all which can be tracked down by doing a simple search on facebook. If it's an address, you can plug it into Google maps, and Google will tell you how to get to that person's home. Great if you need to get somewhere important and you mean no harm, but it makes it just as easy for a criminal to get somewhere with harm intended. Why is it that our parents would never give out pictures of themselves to random strangers, phone numbers and addresses to random strangers? Because it made sense, 'Why would I want to be staulked?" Why our are parents allowing us to put everything about us on the internet with a threat of being staulked. In reality, each and everyone of us is staulked and or is staulking others when we look at a random persons photo album.

          For some reason though, we all accept the art of staulking. Staulking isn't a bad thing anymore for some reason. When we think about it, it sounds awful, but when we are participating in it, we forget what we are doing.

          Facebook has hit a goldmine, and is making billions if not trillions off our human weak spot... We want to know everything about everyone because it is interesting. Rumors spread easily in school because everyone want's to know, and everyone want's to tell others... for some reason. We simply like to interact and "Secrets are no fun unless you tell everyone," right?

          So Facebook said, oh wow, we can make tons and ton's off of stupid teenagers and young adults who are vulnerable for ATTENTION!

Why is the governement allowing all of us to be staulked/ staulk others? Isn't staulking illegal?

          If asked "would you want to be staulked" most would answer absolutely not! Then why do you have your profile visible to random strangers? And why do you have over 600 'friends' on facebook?

          I admit, Facebook is great, I learn something new about someone everytime I log on. Kinda weird, but interesting to say the least. Why are we like this? We must question ourselves from time to time on how we are living our lives. I am now questioning whether or not we can grow up as well as our parents did with everything about our life, since we were younger being present permanately on the internet. I ask my mom sometimes about how she grew up, and it's similar but completely different than how my generation is growing up. I could be wrong, but I think we all need to have a reality check and think about how we live our lives every day. 

          I'm not sure if I explained the idea of my book clearly here...

          With this book, I plan to have about 3 or 4 other students around my age write about their lives and how they grew up around the World Wide Web.

          I'm already working with one student at The University of Rhode Island.

         I'm hoping to get a few more students who have different backgrounds to write about their lives in the virtual world.

         It will be a book for older generations to understand how we grew up/ how we are growing up. It will also be a diary for many of us to reflect on, and understand how we are living and how we should possibly change to come back to reality (unless reality thus far is a permanent state of being). This idea will be explored throughout the book.

          If anyone has any tips, they would be much appreciated.

          Adults- please post your thoughts about what you would like to see covered in this book.

        Students- If anyone would like to take part in the creation of this book, please contact me or post a comment and we can talk.

Thank you very much for reading this blog post. The title will be changed once I have come up with a permanent name... in the meantime, I will still be blogging my thoughts and ideas :).

Matthew Berger

University of Rhode Island 2013